


A Series of One

by Satchelfoot



Category: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Canon Relationships, F/M, Male Friendship, Timeline Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 17:03:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21165083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satchelfoot/pseuds/Satchelfoot
Summary: Mordecai Roberts is still haunted by dreams of the Dright, who may not be done with Series Twelve just yet.





	A Series of One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shewhoguards](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewhoguards/gifts).

Mordecai stands before the Dright, unable to move. The folk of Series Eleven stand around them, some peering with dispassionate curiosity, others smiling derisively. Once in a while, a mirthless titter escapes from one of them like a forgotten grub crawling half-eaten out of a bird’s beak.

_Did you really think_, the Dright says without speaking, _that you could ever belong to yourself?_

Mordecai cannot speak, will not scream. He will not.

_Take it out and give it back._

Mordecai knows he can never do that, not once he has tasted the wonderful cinnamon presence of his soul within him, but he still watches his own fingers reach up and plunge into his chest, pushing his ribs aside like so many twigs. Still, he _will not scream_. He will not.

But he does. Oh, does he scream.

“Mordecai! Mordecai, it’s all right!” Rosalie’s strong arms encircled him. “You’re all right, love. I’m here. You’re here. All of you is right here.”

He gasped. He hugged himself, feeling all his ribs right where they belonged. His mind reached out to see that his soul was still lodged in the right place as well. After every nightmare, he awoke more than half-convinced that it would be gone. Mordecai leaned into Rosalie’s embrace, willing the tension to seep out of him against her familiar weight.

Once his heartbeat was slow and steady again, she asked, “The same one?”

“The very bloody same. He won’t let me alone. Or my own mind won’t let me alone, depending on where these dreams are actually coming from.” He shook his head and held back a sob. “What if it’s just me? What if I’m going to keep having the same dream every fortnight for the rest of my life?”

Rosalie rested her chin on his shoulder. “Then I’ll be right here every fortnight. Every single time.”

\---

The disappearances began innocuously enough. Small household implements began to disappear from World 12A: ladles, gardening shears, lamps, clay pots. Nothing of any particular value, and certainly nothing with any magical properties whatsoever. Most people, including those with magic capabilities, assumed it was just a prank being pulled by some cheeky enchanter from another world (some of them over in 12D could be right scamps, when it came right down to it). But the full list of disappeared items had not yet been viewed by Mordecai Roberts.

“Morning, Flavian,” Mordecai said one morning, freshly shaven and properly dressed, not a hint of a troubled night visible on him.

“Good day, Mordecai,” Flavian responded, passing over a new pot of coffee and the morning’s reports. “I don’t believe you’ll find anything especially remarkable in today’s work. Those odd disappearances of small household items have continued, but otherwise Series Twelve remains quiet—suspiciously quiet, according to Gabriel. But that’s Gabriel, after all.” Chrestomanci had been rather jumpy since his return from Series Eleven.

“Quite,” Mordecai said, wandering to his desk—where he jumped so suddenly he sloshed coffee onto his brown loafers. For just a fraction of a second, out of the corner of his eye, he distinctly saw one of his kinfolk crouching under there, peering at him incuriously. “Bloody—!”

“What?” Flavian’s head jerked up. “What is it?”

“I don’t—“ Mordecai carefully put down the cup with shaking hands and backed away from his desk. No one and nothing was under there besides dust and a small pile of paperwork from the previous few weeks. Because of course there was nothing else. There couldn’t be. “It’s nothing. I suppose I’m a little like Gabriel right now—still adjusting to the lack of excitement since we caught the Wraith gang.”

A skeptical “Mrrrrroot?” issued from an armchair on the other side of the office as Throgmorten hopped off it and came over to nuzzle and headbutt Mordecai’s shins.

“Are you quite sure there’s nothing else going on, old boy?” Flavian inquired, evaluating Mordecai and the cat over the rims of his spectacles. “You know I take you at your word, only that creature is never, ever so affectionate with any person but Christopher and Millie unless he knows something’s wrong.”

Mordecai glared down at Throg and bent to scritch his ears. “Yes, we all know this beast is rather a snitch. All right, Flavian. Things are not well with me. I may tell you more sometime over a pint. In the meantime, please be assured that I confide in Rosalie and, when necessary, Gabriel regarding the issue. I…” He had straightened up and his eye had wandered to the current report at the top of the stack on his desk. On the first page was an exhaustive list of everything that had gone missing by apparently magical means in the past few weeks. His eyes narrowed. “Well, that certainly can’t be right.” He sat and combed over the list repeatedly, growing more agitated every time. 

“Oh, no. No, that _cannot_ be good,” he said finally.

“What is it?” Flavian came over and looked over Mordecai’s shoulder at the list.

He shuddered, a little pale. “Flavian, old man, please tell Gabriel I need to speak with him immediately.”

\---

Since losing her magic to the Wraith’s dreadful weapon, Rosalie had spent some time at a loss as to what her role at the Castle should look like going forward. No one wanted her to leave, of course, and she herself had nowhere else in the world she would rather be, but she knew she would need more to do than assist Gabriel and Flavian with government documents, bat for the cricket team, and keep steady company with Mordecai Roberts. She took a job at the town bookseller’s, made friends with local girls who were good for a drink and a bit of music and gossip at week-ends, and developed a keen interest in the Castle armory. Gabriel referred her to the complete catalogue of weapons available there, and she hired a tutor from out of town—considerably out of town, given that the woman she found was a seasoned warrior/sorceress from 12G—to instruct her in skilled combat and nonmagical self-defense. She had yet to start on range weapons, but she was quite good at hand-to-hand sparring and her proficiency with staff and broadsword was coming along nicely. Gabriel’s spells may have protected the Castle and held its ancient stones together, but none of them, in the end, had been enough to keep out the Wraith, and there were stories of worse invaders in the long history of witchcraft in the Related Worlds. The good wizards and witches in those stories had almost always needed a protector. Rosalie could be that protector for the Castle and the town, and so she would be.

Mordecai’s knock on the door of her training room that afternoon was such a severe breach of protocol that she rushed to let him in, thinking an emergency must have occurred. But he looked somewhat embarrassed when he saw the look on her face.

“I’m sorry to alarm you,” he said. “I know I’m not to disturb you when you’re in here or at work unless it’s urgent.” He hesitated and looked away.

“Well?” she asked finally, not unkindly, tilting her head down until he was compelled to meet her eyes.

“It’s the Dright,” he said finally. “All those strange disappearances of random objects throughout the world? They’re not random at all. The Dright is testing the limits of the border between our world and his. I need to go back to Series Eleven and make him stop before he moves on to taking people.”

\---

It was something about the properties of the objects and the order in which they had been taken. Mordecai could never quite describe it satisfactorily to anyone who was not one of his people, but the selection of items and the time between thefts pointed directly to the Dright. Gabriel did not doubt Mordecai’s conclusion, but it took some doing to convince him that the solution was that Mordecai should return to Series Eleven to confront him. 

“And what’s to prevent him from simply taking your soul back, or worse?” Gabriel asked with the most severe disapproval. 

“Nothing at all,” Mordecai said honestly, “except that he loves to play with his food. He will get round to taking me back eventually, but I intend to present my terms to him long before he stops faffing about with me.”

“Terms?” Gabriel’s brow furrowed, if possible, even more deeply. “And what would those be?”

Mordecai told him.

\---

There was no fence anywhere in sight.

Whereas, on Mordecai’s previous visit, he and his friends had been surrounded on all sides by an impenetrable barrier, it now appeared that they might wander as the wished throughout Series Eleven. A few dozen of his people stood or sat or reclined around them, most of them looking quite fixedly at something else, the rest staring at the group in unconcealed boredom. 

In the midst of the assembled elflike personages stood three travelers: Mordecai, Rosalie, and Throgmorten. Mordecai had not even tried to dissuade Rosalie from accompanying him, and Gabriel and Throg had both been quite insistent about the need for another protector. If all went according to plan, they would be needed in a moment. If not, it would not really matter anyway.

The Dright stood in a small cluster of five or six other beings, muttering to them in a convincing but bizarre approximation of casual conversation. Even if the four of them had not known precisely what he looked like, he stood out from the rest for a very particular reason: he was the only one among them wearing an immaculately tailored three-piece suit. To anyone else, he may have looked like any Series Twelve businessman on his way to a board meeting in clothes that hung off him in a vaguely ill-fitting manner, as if the tailor had mismeasured by an inch or two. To Mordecai, however, everything about the clothes looked deeply, horrifyingly wrong, every crease far too sharp or too loose. It hurt to look at. It was obscene.

“Tacroy,” the Dright said, and the sound of his spirit name was like a shard of ice being dragged along the back of Mordecai’s neck. “See me! I have dressed according to the custom of your world. Does it not become me beautifully? And you have returned to me, as I always knew you would.”

“I have.” Mordecai held a slim wooden box in his hands. “My lord, I know you have been taking items from the adjacent world to test its borders and protections. I have grown fond of the world known as 12A and would as lief see you choose other worlds for the expansion of your power. Should you relinquish all claim to that world, just that one, I will present to you the object you would have taken next—and humbly offer to return my soul to you, its rightful owner.”

The Dright raised his eyebrows. “And what makes you think I would want _that_ back, little Septman? You dare offer me one soul when I have thousands here in my home and millions more for the taking in the other worlds? What can yours possibly offer me?”

Mordecai forced a smile. “The savor of a soul that has grown and lived in your august presence, known itself free for a time, and then returned to its proper place beneath your heel. I hope you will not deny, lord, that hope and despair in such a form would be unique in your experience.”

The Dright seemed almost intrigued. “Show me the object you have brought me and remove your soul, and I will spare your sad little adopted world.” It was a lie, of course. The Dright would consider nothing but the quickest way to greater power. He would eat Mordecai’s soul, followed by Rosalie’s and, after some struggle, even Throgmorten’s. He would devastate the related worlds the moment he could get into them.

Mordecai stood before the Dright, holding out the small wooden case. The Dright reached out casually to take it, as if to satisfy his idle curiosity about the contents. He opened it and his eyes flicked down for a fraction of a second to the scraggly, well-used paintbrush inside: another random object to anyone in 12A, but one that would indeed have been the next item on the Dright’s list.

“Ah. My collection is now even more exquisite,” the Dright said with no particular inflection or sign of approval. He looked up. “And now—“

He stopped. And stared. And kept staring.

Mordecai held a dagger an inch away from the Dright’s left eye. He kept it steady, watching the Dright run through the number of incantations that would turn the weapon into a worm or a banana, that would cause it to turn on Mordecai or burst into flames in his hands. They both knew Mordecai could be disarmed and destroyed in a blink, but they also knew that Mordecai, who was from this place and had been raised to pay attention to every smallest detail of its ruler’s thoughts, would see the spell coming. Which would move faster, the man’s knife or the Dright’s curse?

The Dright, for less than a second, was afraid. The fear did not show itself in any way that could be seen, but it was there, and it caused him, for the first time in thousands of years, to act instinctively.

It would not be enough to send forth a spell that would probably kill the three interlopers where they stood. That was not a sufficiently certain method. It would not absolutely guarantee the Dright’s survival. And the Dright must continue. Nothing whatsoever was more important than that.

Not even the one other thing he had spent so long safeguarding: the uniqueness of his realm as a series of one.

The Dright’s mind reached into the past and created a timeline in which his former subject had tripped before pulling out the knife. He made another timeline in which he, the Dright, surged into Mordecai on sight and ripped his soul from his body so quickly that Mordecai died instantly. Another blink, and there was a timeline in which the wretched boy had never come back at all. As long as the Dright was out of danger in at least one timeline, he would safeguard his existence and his power.

But not all of his power.

The more the timelines diverged, the more Drights ruled more Elevens, the more diluted his power became in each individual world. Rather than one all-powerful god-mage, he became many rulers of many realms, with his power divided among them. As soon as he realized what was happening, he stopped, but it was too late. In the shortest possible moment, he had already created seven realities diverging from the time immediately before the travelers’ arrival. In no time at all, Series Eleven had become just that: a series. And the Dright was only one of himself among many. He could not allow that.

He yelled an incantation and disappeared into one of those accursed other worlds to kill one of his other selves.

\---

The beings of Series Eleven stared at the space where their Dright had been. They had felt a great change in the world just before his disappearance, but they did not understand what had just happened. As far as they knew, a former subject, one so deeply beneath him that they would never before have spared a look for him, had threatened the lord of the Sept, and then the world had seemed to shake apart, and then this upstart had made the Dright vanish. A frightened, infuriated wail went up as they closed in around the three dimensional travelers.

Rosalie drew a broadsword from the scabbard slung along her back. “This was the plan, right?”

Mordecai prepared a spell to cast on his advancing, enraged worldfolk. “Yes, I’m afraid this was the best-case scenario.”

“So we’re now in just one of many Series Eleven worlds?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s what just happened.”

Throgmorten arched his back and dodged a vicious spell thrown by one of the mages surrounding the group. The powers of the elflike beings, like those of their lord, had been diluted in the splitting of the series, but the odds of breaking away from them long enough to run back to the Gate between worlds were still a bit grim.

“All right. Then we’ve done what we came here to do.” Rosalie turned and kissed Mordecai deeply. “I’d really like us to bloody well get out of here, but I love you regardless of what happens next.”

“I love you too.” Mordecai’s soul, firmly held within him, felt lighter than he had ever thought it could. “Let’s go home.”


End file.
